Avenida de Nazaret

Takes its name from Nazareth, the town in Lower Galilee where, according to the Gospels, Jesus of Nazareth grew up. The Hebrew place name is set within a series of biblical references chosen when the Niño Jesús neighbourhood was built in the second half of the twentieth century.

To the southeast of the Retiro, over waste ground and the embankments left by the railway, the Niño Jesús neighbourhood grew up from 1947. The developer Urbis laid it out, in a project that stretched over decades. Whoever named the streets looked to the life of Christ and left a small Gospel map scattered across the neighbourhood: Annunciation, Bethlehem, the Magi, Jericho, Bethany, Samaria. Avenida de Nazaret joins that family of names, evoking the Galilean village where Jesus spent his childhood. The avenue also acts as a hinge between two neighbourhoods. To the south it links Niño Jesús with Estrella along an axis that carries on through calle de los Astros and calle de la Estrella Polar, a whole grid of streets named after constellations. Anyone walking here passes, almost without noticing, from the Gospel story to the starry sky. At its northern end it opens onto plaza del Niño Jesús, facing the children’s hospital of the same name.

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